We're going prewar with this Chrysler, which I found parked just around the corner from the '60 Bel Air sedan and the '73 Corvette. It looks to be in very good shape for a street-parked 70-year-old car.

The '40 Windsor came with a 108-horsepower Chrysler Flathead Six, which would be a laughable number nowadays… until you consider that this car's shipping weight was only 3,210 pounds. Back in 1940, car buyers had to put up with road noise, and they were forced to sweat when the weather got hot. You had no holders for your ridiculously undersized soda bottles, and the kids in back were forced to look out the window for entertainment- you know, at cows and stuff. If you wrecked- which was pretty easy to do, considering the sketchy brakes and low-tech tires of the era- you ate dashboard! But all those inconveniences made for a very lightweight vehicle for its size, and thus we have a big suicide-door sedan that weighs 315 pounds less than a 2010 Chrysler Sebring (and is approximately 315,000,000 times better looking).

In other words, I'm not making any promises that this Firebird left the factory as one of the 3,196 Trans Ams built for the 1970 model year, given the widespread availability of aftermarket reproduction Trans Am body parts and decals. We might not even be looking at a '70 model here. But, really, who cares? It's a solid-looking 39-year-old Pontiac that still parks and drives on the street, and that's what we love about the Island That Rust Forgot.

The '70 Trans Am came with a 335-horse Pontiac V8, which gave the 3,550-pound car pretty impressive acceleration. Compare that to the 3,106-pound, 348-horsepower '64 GTO, however, and you can see how the inexorable process of Model Bloat requires ever-larger doses of horsepower just to tread water.

Look, the DOTS '66 Mustang lives on the same block, and the DOTS '65 GMC pickup lives nearby as well.

I was in a rush when I spotted this well-used classic, so I couldn't get many photos; since then it hasn't returned to this spot. My knowledge of vintage campers isn't so great, so we'll need to depend on our more knowledgeable readers to fill us in on just what we've got here.

Alameda seems well-stocked with Darts; in this series, we've seen this '64 Dart coupe, this '64 Dart wagon, this '66 Dart GT (which I shot just down the block from today's car), this '69 Dart GT convertible, another '69 Dart GT convertible, this '70 Dart with Buick hubcaps, and this Malaisetastic '75 Dart Swinger.

This street boasts quite a few DOTS honoress; that's the '59 Ford F-100 a few spaces down from the Dart.

This 3/4-ton hauler belongs to the Alameda Unified School District, and probably delivered the crates of pencils, gallon jugs of Elmer's Glue, and that terrible pulpy gray paper that I used in elementary school. Nobody notices a plain white cargo van; I've probably seen it hundreds of times and only now have I paid enough attention to photograph it.

It suffers from the usual Northern California top-down rust, which should eat through the metal in another decade or two.

I'm having a tough time figuring out the year of this 122S; the early-series yellow-on-black license plates mean it's no newer than '63 or '64, and the grille also suggests that era, but we'll need a real Amazon expert to tell us for sure.

This car appears to be in excellent original condition, and it's even a two-door!

I spotted this Volvo parked in front of a local Volvo shop, across the street from the '87 BMW L6 and parked in the exact same spot that gave us the '70 164. Check out the Bertone 262C in the background.

A parts car, destined to be picked clean and then discarded as scrap, or a project that just became too overwhelming and/or pissed off the landlord and/or wife to the point where the junkyard seemed like the only way out? Impossible to say. In any case, it appears that a few bits and pieces- including the engine and transmission- remain on this Olds.

Of course not! Yeah, I could have gone out and shot any one of the dozen or so VW T2 Transporters on the island that remain un-DOTS-ified, but that will have to wait for another weekend. I spotted this El Camino while checking for the supposedly-street-legal Dai Hard Daihatsu Charade LeMons car that lives nearby, in the same household as the '69 Morris Minor Traveller.

Dai Hard must have been in the garage, but it was worth the (two-block) walk to see this El Camino. I've always preferred the angular look of the '64-67 GM A-bodies to the more bulbous '68-72 models, and I think the Chevelle was the best-looking of The General's intermediates during this period. This Chevelle-with-a-truck-bed has a mean-looking coat of primer and cowl-induction hood scoop, and it appears to be a rust-free example of a fairly rare street-driven cartruck.

We've already seen Jesse's '66 Datsun 411, his '61 Austin Mini, his '70 Puma GT (now sold to a buyer in Denmark), and his '83 Toyota 4x4 truck. Now he's added this classic Detroit cartruck to his stable.

This El Camino is in very solid, rust-free original condition, and the original Tonawanda-built 2-barrel 350 still sounds fresh. Could this be the only '69 El Camino in the world that doesn't have headers and a Holley 750 double-pumper by now?

The one questionable modification that's been done to this machine might be the "vinyl top" made out of protective bed-liner coating. It looks OK and is likely impervious to meteorite damage, but just doesn't seem like a good idea.

I'm not enough of an El Camino expert to know whether the proper term for this one is "El Camino Malibu" or something else; the '69 El Camino being a Chevelle with a truck bed meant that the Chevelle's Malibu trim package was an available option. Any of you experts out there got an opinion on the subject?

Known as the Datsun 140J in Europe and the Nissan Violet in Japan, the Datsun 710 was priced between the sporty 610 and the bare-bones B210 in the North American market. You got a 100-horsepower L20 in your $3,469 2-door 710 in 1975, which was pretty steep compared to the $2,769 Pinto or the $2,786 Vega. In fact, $3,195 would have bought you a brand-new '75 Dodge Dart with a V8... but inflation and crazy gas prices were making the Datsuns look pretty good to car buyers back then.

It's always fun when I can get more than one DOTS car in a single photograph, as we see here with the '73 BMW 2002tii in the background.

Let's take a look at the others before we admire today's street survivor:

First, this '72.

Another '72.

Yet another '72.

This '76.

This '77 Traveler.

And this final-year '80. OK, now on to today's truck!


This truck, built during the next-to-last year of Scout production, lives just around the corner from the super-clean '64 Galaxie 500 convertible we saw last weekend. It appears to be a daily driver. Who needs cup holders and faux wood dash trim?

Some might say that Alameda- which is quite urban, completely paved, snow-free, and lacking in any hills of any sort- isn't the kind of place where a Scout makes sense. We disagree, however; a Scout always makes sense!

The Galaxie 500 was the middle-of-the-road trim level for the full-sized Ford in 1964; much spiffier than the Custom but not quite as glitzed-out as the Galaxie 500XL. You got a 260-cubic-inch V8 as standard Galaxie 500 equipment, but a few bucks more would buy you the 289 or 390.

Detroit needs to bring back badging that looks like this! And I don't mean that faux-chrome plastic stuff- I mean genuine low-bidder peely-ass chrome and won't-stay-shiny-for-long aluminum, like in the old days!

Can you hurl a paint-splattered ladder into the bed of your truck from 20 feet away and not flinch when it hits? The owner of this fine American machine- which parks just a couple blocks from Chez Murilee- can do that!

Back in '59, a base half-ton Ford Styleside pickup would have run you $1,938, or about $14,500 in 2009 bucks. For that price you got a 223-cube I6 and a three-speed manual transmission. That's way cheaper than the least expensive Ford sedan, which was the $2,132 Custom 300 Six business coupe. What a deal!

We had our second-ever first-gen Camaro yesterday, and this Porsche- which happened to be parked less than a block away- is our second-ever 356 (after this '63 autocross veteran; this Speedster replica doesn't count, though it's still a cool car). What are the odds that both DOTS 356s would be green '63s?

Actually, I'm not 100% sure this is a '63; it's definitely a T6 Karmann-built 356B coupe, but it could be a '62 (though I'm pretty sure the engine lid badging on the Super didn't read "S" that year) or a '64-65 (but this car appears to have drum brakes, which were dumped after '63). Obviously, this is the sort of thing that must be correct, lest Porsche fanatics- who make Detroit muscle car worshipers seem like well-balanced, reasonable individuals, which is saying something- make me write "I WILL NOT ACCUSE FERDINAND PORSCHE OF RIPPING OFF HANS LEDWINKA EVER EVER AGAIN" 988 times (one for every year of the Thousand Year Reich that didn't happen) in every Porsche post I write in the future. Right. So, Porsche experts, is this really a '63?

Something that you Citroën fans might find disturbing is the fact that this car appears to have replaced the 1969 DS wagon; this Porsche lives at the same house and I haven't seen the Citroën for quite a while. Which would you prefer as your daily driver? Tough call for me, but I think I'm leaning more in the direction of the French wagon.

Well, that changes now, because we've got this spotless '67 RS convertible for you; it follows in the footsteps of this purple '69 coupe. I'd seen this car at the Park Street Car Show, but it was surrounded by a crowd of other early Camaros and didn't really jump out at me.

This car gets the Murilee Stamp-O-Approval™ because A) the original 327 is still there, B) the original Powerglide isn't still there (the owner ditched the Slip-N-Slide for a Tremec 5-speed, and I say good riddance to a transmission that sucks for any use other than drag racing and beer labels; if you purists think that's a crime, feel free to take a break from studying hose clamp date codes to scrawl a venomous tirade in the comments), C) it's not red or black, and D) it gets driven on the street. Not every day, obviously, and it doesn't sleep on the street, but I caught it while its owner was using it to run an errand to the hardware store. The same hardware store, incidentally, at which I photographed the 1937 London Cab.

The General was late to the party started by the Mustang (and Barracuda), but the snazzed-up crypto-Nova hit the showrooms running and sold like crazy. In 1967, you could get a base V8 Camaro convertible for $2,809 (the Rally Sport option package pushed the price up to $2,914), versus $2,806 for a '67 Mustang convertible with the base 289. Meanwhile, the '67 Plymouth Barracuda V8 convertible went for $2,860. The Chevy had the most powerful base engine (210 horsepower versus 200 for the Ford's 289 and 180 for the Plymouth's 273), but all three could have been stuffed with a monster big-block if the customer's wallet permitted.

Actually, you don't see many Alfas on the island, period; our last one was this '65 Giulia SS, which we saw last winter. Before that, we had this 164 L- a '91, just like today's car. What are the odds?

Alfa Romeo stopped selling cars in North America in 1995, and it was pretty clear to car shoppers that they'd be folding their tents for quite a while before that year. That means the original purchaser of this car loved the idea of a sporty Italian sedan so much that he or she didn't give a damn that the car would soon be an orphan, repairable only by cranky non-factory-authorized mechanics using parts shipped from Europe at fabulous expense. We can totally respect that decision.

It has a GTO hood and grille emblem, but a Tempest grille and column-shifted automatic. Even though you could a '68 GTO with the chrome grille instead of the sledgehammer-proof Endura snout, hardly any buyers did so. As for the column shifter, I'm pretty sure the Hurst dual-gate was standard issue on automatic GTOs and Pontiac stopped installing Powerglides in GTOs after 1966… but I betcha there's some guy out there with a PhD in Tedious General Motors Facts who can cite chapter and verse about the 18 1968 GTOs that got chrome grilles and column-shifted Turbo 400s via some renegade dealership in Alaska. Fine. I'm still going to say that we're looking at a '68 Tempest or LeMans with some GTO parts bolted on.

Or, hell, maybe it's a '69 Cutlass with some Tempest sheet metal welded in; that might explain the Oldsmobile Rally Wheels. You can see where this game will drive you nuts in a hurry, and it's one of the reasons I avoid most classic muscle car shows. Anyway, who cares what DNA this car has? It's a cool-looking GM A-body that lives on the street and gets regular real-world driving action, while most of its siblings have been crushed or turned into coddled garage queens. I suspect that its owner is the same person who once owned this 1966 Mustang, since it parks in the same spot once occupied by the Ford. Perhaps he or she celebrated the date on the car's "Bush's Last Day" bumper sticker by upgrading to a bigger, more powerful Detroit classic.

I found this cartruck parked outside Alameda's Tiki Overload Headquarters a couple months back. The bar was having a small pseudo-car-show, and this Chevy was parked just behind the '51 Dodge Wayfarer we saw a while back.

A base, six-cylinder 1959 El Camino listed at $2,352 new, or about $400 more than a half-ton stepside Chevrolet pickup. For those extra bucks you got a car-like ride and those snazzy fins, though cargo-hauling ability wasn't quite up to serious truck standards. Which would you have chosen?

In North America, the Ford Capri was branded simply "Capri" and sold in Mercury dealerships; the later Mustang-clone Fox Capri had Mercury emblems on the car. I think sufficient time has passed since the Early Malaise Era to permit us to call this car a Ford.

This is only the second Alameda DOTS Capri, after this '72; beloved as these cars were (and are) in Europe, they never really hit it big on our side of the Atlantic. You could buy a new 1974 Capri with the 2.8 liter V6 for $3,807. Compare that to the $3,081 price tag on a 5.0 liter V8-powered '74 Grabber Maverick. Sure, the Capri handled better, but less car for more money?

I've been saving a lot of street-parked Mustangs in reserve for this series, but the island has so many of them that I'm going to try to knock out the years we haven't seen yet: 1964-1/2, 1970, 1971, and 1972.

This car is owned by an Alameda High School classmate of mine, and it serves as his daily driver; he was a little concerned that it should get a bath before being photographed, but I explained that the whole point of DOTS is that these are real-world cars, not spotless trailer queens. You'll find it parked out in front of his shop, Royal Auto Repair, where it no doubt serves as an advertisement to the many original owners of 60s cars on the island.